


A Discordant Wail

by PaulaMcG



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Animagus, Canon Compliant, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Music, Pre-Sirius Black in Azkaban, Semi-Public Sex, Sheep, Sirius Black as Padfoot, Song: Bohemian Rhapsody, Summer, Werewolf Remus Lupin, countryside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:35:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22391869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaulaMcG/pseuds/PaulaMcG
Summary: Soon after leaving school Remus revels in intimacy with Sirius, and tries to sing and play the lute while discussing his prospects.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Kudos: 8





	A Discordant Wail

**Author's Note:**

> Remus and his friends will never help me make any money. This piece can stand on its own, but it also belongs to the same extensive story in my Rowling's-first-five-novels-compliant universe as the rest of my fanfiction.  
> My Marauders left Hogwarts in summer 1976, and my Remus does not have a Muggle or Muggle-born parent.

My parents’ sheep have just witnessed our intimacy. Lying on the scorched grass, my whole blessed body covered with his, I’m returning from my fantasy to stare at the familiar reality of the flock, but I don’t let go of the black tendrils entangled around my fingers. For a moment more I savour the soft lips against my neck, the tickling of a hint of a moustache, stronger than mine.

Then some sudden bleating startles Sirius, and another hilarious sound follows, as he separates the skin of his chest and belly from mine, both moist of more than sweat. He chortles when rolling onto his back, and a flash of pique rises in me, since I realise he still feels such embarrassment that he’s grateful for this way to hide it. One of my hands has stayed in his hair, and perhaps no more out of tender feelings than out of spite, I turn to kiss him once more, just on his earlobe, though.

I’m the first to rise up to my knees, while he only lifts his hips to hitch his shorts higher. We rebel also by wearing scanty Muggle clothes. Unlike him I’ve kept my t-shirt on, and I now pull the hem down without glancing at my oldest scars.

But there’s no escape. No miracle of love can erase the most solid reality of those marks left by claws, or the most fatal one – the bite scar on my shoulder. No, I do not want to dwell on that and spoil what I can have now: don’t want to miss him today, miss any chance for all my senses to revel in the wonder of him right here with me, at the edge of our pasture.

He’s sprawled under the July afternoon sun, which lends his tan a delicious glow. His breathing slows down, mixed with the chirping of grasshoppers, their paradoxically soporific mating call, and his eyelashes lower to draw frail shadows above the grace of high cheekbones.

“Bloody hot,” I say, and I wait for his lids to flutter open, then grin, continuing, “You are, for sure!”

I’m so fortunate. James was invited by Lily’s parents, and I got Sirius here just for myself like a year ago. This truly was where he wanted to come, what he wanted to do. And I want him again, again and again, ferociously, fiercely, so fearlessly.

We’ve stayed still for a moment, eyeing each other, squinting a bit, and our grins have softened to slow, perhaps secretly tremulous smiles in the sultry aftermath laziness of the deepest connection. Then his arm rises and his fingers meet my outreaching hand, grab it to let me pull him up and close. Like a child, and not embarrassed about it, I hold his hand, walking him to the shade of the sheep shed. 

This is perhaps still fantasy: these lands – not mine, legally – the last haven, the final summer, and I’ll leave it all behind and face the truth.

The melody I’ve heard Lily sing all through the spring plays in my mind with that phrase of the lyrics, when I see the lute we’ve left on the stone bench by the shed wall. I place the instrument on my lap when we sit down side by side. 

Touching a string tentatively, I provoke a responding baa from some of those sheep who, too, have come to seek shelter from the sun. And I’m rewarded with another chortle from Sirius. He finds this flock absurdly amusing, as he knows it’s had a wolf as its shepherd.

“They love this sound. You know why?” I pick up the quill, which my father has taught me to use as a plectrum, in the medieval fashion, when playing this lute, one of his oldest instruments. “These strings’re made of sheep gut.”

“So the bleating was a gut reaction!”

“Right.” I pluck several strings, fumbling for the melody. “And I go with my gut feeling, too.”

Having heard me humming – something I often do at home – Sirius insisted that I must know how to play, didn’t want to believe me when I said I’d tried to learn but just disappointed my father.

I didn’t mean to make you cry. Him, or “Mama” either. I’ve made them cry so often… with my body aching all the time. First when my life had just begun. And now when it’s supposed to begin.

“Mama…” I sing, then say, “You know, perhaps there’s no way I can help it. They’ll both be disappointed again.”

“You mean your Potions NEWT? Or Charms?” He’s slouching, resting the back of his head on the humid wall. 

“The NEWTs don’t matter.” I attempt a melody again. “Nothing really matters…”

Now he glances at me, sitting up so as to fish out from a back pocket a squashed pack of fags. Taking his time to also light his fag in the Muggle way, he’s again an insufferable show-off with his rebellion, and I have to subdue a threatening trace of resentment – and a flow of desire. After breathing out smoke, he sticks out the tip of his tongue when placing the fag between my lips.

While I’m trying to breathe, to not cough, he finally responds, “So why did you tell your parents you misplaced your certificate? I don’t think – and I’m sure you don’t think – that it got into Peter’s trunk.”

“No. I don’t think I’ll show it to anyone ever. But I’m glad you took yours with you and showed it to them. I’m proud of you.” I envy him, I envy them both, James and him, I’m even jealous. “I’ll be proud of my two Auror friends.” 

Already bored with smoking, he rubs the butt on the edge of the bench, flicks it away. “And I’m proud of you. You said Dumbledore’s suggested you study Defence – at Merlin College?”

My Pads, all relaxed and flippant, he’s infuriating and so irresistible that I wouldn’t like to spoil his charm by sharing what I know, how I feel. 

I wish… I wish I could feel only anger. But I feel like crying. And I shiver, and want it to be just the shade, the stone, the damp shirt. I want to tell him simply, “I’m cold.”

Suddenly he’s right here with me, shifts closer and wraps an arm around my shoulders.

The lute almost slips down from my knees. I force my right hand to grab the neck more firmly. The left hand holds the quill as if it could draw my desires, paint my pain again on parchment or canvas. This is so much harder. I’m approaching the melody line but dare not sing the words: sometimes I wish…

He’s caressing my shoulder, now pressing his fingers on my collarbone so roughly I have to wince. The bite mark is familiar to him since the first moonsets when he saw me all naked – since before our discoveries that this wolf wouldn’t hurt animals and each of my three friends could learn to turn into a rat or… I wonder if he’s deliberately touching me right there, to show he’ll listen, if what bothers me has got something to do with… the furry problem. 

Now I don’t mind his learning the ugly truth. “I made it sound pretty brilliant. But he means there’ll be for me just one branch – sub-field, whatever: Defence against Dark Creatures.”

“What the hell…” He frowns. 

“Dumbledore…” I hate to even say his name. “And some scholar colleagues at Oxford… They planned this long-term empirical study and started it seven years ago. It’s been his scheme all the time. No alternative for me. But he’s revealed it all to me only now. He even let me first see my Hogwarts certificate without a warning.” I’ve turned my gaze to my hands pressing down the strings, but now I glance up with an attempt at a grin – to meet only his profile. “My coming-of-age visit to the Registry should have warned me. Remember, last summer I was all mopey, too. Because they made it clear I had no wizard status. But we all wanted to believe that a Hogwarts certificate would change this. Dumbledore himself promised I could even get to Oxford. And now he lets me know: I’ll get there as a guinea-pig – and that’s how I got to Hogwarts, too. That’s all I’ve been: his experiment.”

After my last, bitter words, spit out in powerless frustration, I have to endure his ever harsher clutch of my shoulder while he ponders, reaches for grim comprehension. “So he didn’t arrange it because… He didn’t give you the chance because of any high principles of equality, or love, respect for your parents, or even sympathy!”

I’m just a poor boy. I need no sympathy. “I’ve never had a chance!”

“Sod him!” Now the anger is in him. He moves abruptly, shoves me on the back of my neck.

The lute tumbles to the ground with a discordant wail, and the closest sheep bleat their indignation, then start shifting away.

He strides out to the sunlight with them. With his back to me he goes on swearing, just as he’s promised to do it for me, then attempts a solution. “You’ve got great NEWTs. Apply somewhere else!”

“I told you, the NEWTs won’t count.” It’s such a relief to talk to him, to do it like this – from a few yards’ distance and when he’s not looking – that I feel calm enough to be able to pick up the lute and check it’s unharmed. “The certificate spells it all out. What I am. My full, registered name. And the clarification: sub-human.”

“No! You – you who’re more than…” Now he’s swirled around, he’s staring at me.

I quickly bend my head to focus on the quill, plucking the strings. And I almost make it before my voice cracks. “Sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all.” I have to laugh at my singing while I’m crying, too.

So he can cry and laugh. “Oh, Moony, my drama queen!”

The way he bites his lip makes me suspect he’ll change, escape to barking at the flock. But he takes a step back towards me, buries a hand in the thick wool of a broad sheep who’s standing on his way. “You’ll come to London with me. And you’ll go to Oxford, too. And take your chance, just take it! You’ll show them. Show them what you are, who you are! One day there’ll be a revolt in the whole Creature study, thanks to you. We’ve already started it. You’ve already taken the chance they didn’t mean you to get. That scheming bastard believes he knows everything. Like hell he knows! He doesn’t know what you achieved at Hogwarts: what you inspired and what you gained. He thinks you’re leaving Hogwarts with that bloody certificate. He doesn’t know what you’re leaving with!”

My response starts as a whisper but grows louder, bold, “Our secret weapons!” He’s made me smile, given me faith that we’ll fight together, all of us, free of fear, if not of pain. I’ll see again the confirmation in the gift he’s painstakingly prepared for me. “Change – you want to! And I want you.”

I put the lute away. And when I look up, stand up to go and touch him, he’s changed. My beloved Padfoot, a dog whenever I need, bounces at me, lifts his front paws on my shoulders, licks my wet cheeks. Soon I’ll be wrapped in the man’s hot embrace again, my bloodstream filled with the most exquisite music, the rhythms of his breathing and his heart.

We’re both eighteen, both more than human: man and wolf; man and dog. I can believe in miracles and carry on.

**Author's Note:**

> The song in Remus’s mind is Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) by Queen, another one in mine was Miracle of Love by Eurythmics.


End file.
